


Four Times Hutch Didn't Quit and One Time He Did

by peg22



Category: Starsky & Hutch
Genre: M/M, five things
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-28
Updated: 2014-02-28
Packaged: 2018-01-14 01:08:43
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,206
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1247032
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/peg22/pseuds/peg22
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's got young boys, blood, The Fix, old boys and a new Torino . . . what else is there, really?!</p>
            </blockquote>





	Four Times Hutch Didn't Quit and One Time He Did

**I. Breaking In**

He peered in the small diamond-shaped window, squinted through years of soot and grime and whatever else, and could barely make out the form of a man in a recliner. Bloated. Probably dead. Great. He looked behind him and saw that his training officer, Billy, leaning against the car, watching. He knocked and shouted. The man in the recliner didn't move. He looked back at Billy, now sucking on a toothpick.

"Stiffs don't usually answer the door, Pretty Boy. You're gonna have to break a window."

He turned back to the door. No way was anyone getting through that tiny window. No way was Billy going to haul his ass off the hood of the car to help him. No way was he going to last through six weeks of the Billy and Pretty Boy show. No way should he have ever decided to become a police officer. He looked around the porch for something heavy.

"Try the door, Pretty - sheesh." Billy sighed and bent down to tie his shoe.

He turned the knob and it creaked and then the door opened. The light streamed into the room, carrying him with it until the smell slapped him across the face, sucked all the good air from his lungs. The guy was ripe. Just about to pop. He looked back and saw that Billy had actually shoved himself off the hood and was heading up the steps.

"Don't touch anything."

He ignored Billy and walked slowly towards the man, who had green slime dripping down his face. He fought the urge to puke his guts all over the slip covered couch and took a step closer. And puked his guts all over the slip covered ottoman instead. He hung onto his knees and hoped he wasn’t destroying evidence. He wiped his mouth with the edge of his sleeve and felt a hand on his shoulder.

"Here.” Billy shoved a cigar and a stick of gum in his face. “Chew this and go smoke this.”

He took the gum and stuffed it into his mouth. Billy had already moved to the chair where the guy was still oozing green slime.

“Go wait for the bus.”

Hutch made his way out into the sunshine before he puked again. In the tiny rose bush next to the porch. So much for the gum. He could hear Billy mumbling about fucking rookies and his bum luck to get the girly ones and he reached into his pocket for a cigarette. No way was he going to try to smoke one of Billy’s cigars.

He took a long draw from the cigarette – making a note not to tell Starsky since they had both decided to quit – and sat on the steps that led down to the street. The smell from the body wafted around him, mixing with the smoke, turning it from horrific to mildly noxious. He could hear the siren in the distance and chuckled. No way this guy needed lights and sirens. He’d been dead for a long time.

He looked at his watch. 7:30. No way was he going to get off on time. He could hear his mother’s voice, bankers never work late, and allowed himself a moment behind a mahogany desk in the mortgage assessment department of Duluth Farmer’s Credit Union, pushed himself off the stoop and headed into the house.

 

  **II. Breaking Out**

_“_ Jesus, Hutch – it’s a little baby.”

He didn’t need to see the look of horror on Starsky’s face. He could hear it in every syllable. He could feel it in every finger digging into his arm.

He felt Starsky sag into him and they both took a step back from the dumpster. From the crime scene. From the nightmare that had started when dispatch sent them to the alley on a suspicious activity call. They had already found the mother – dead, throat slashed. Starsky had chased two guys into traffic, but they were just gandys looking for a place to sleep.

They had been a little horrified and a little excited when they called in the dead body and were told detectives were en route. Their third day together on the streets. Alone. Their first crime scene to secure. Their first chance to prove they could be partners. They had been riding together for almost a week because the squad was down three guys already and Starsky had begged and Capt. Ferguson had given in – with a strict warning.

"Don’t fuck anything up. I don’t need shiny-assed rookies messing with my monthly numbers.”

The excitement of finally working together had been tempered by a hundred mind-numbing traffic stops and a dozen domestic disputes. And now this. Hutch hung onto Starsky’s collar as he emptied three burritos and a root beer onto the pavement behind the dumpster. Fought the urge to join him. Fought the urge to push him back into the car and drive somewhere that didn’t smell like piss and death and talcum powder. Where they could leave the job at the time clock, not follow it into their nightmares. Where he could really lose himself in the man whose head was cradled in his hand.

This was life – this thread of a beating heart and the cursing and retching that filled the alley. This new idea of someone who matched him in all the crooked corners of his life. This, not the rest of it.

He looked up as the light blue mustang belonging to John Blaine and his partner roared into the alley, followed by the coroner’s wagon. He patted Starsky on the back and stepped around the dumpster. Back on the job. The hand that brushed his chest as he moved away kept his voice steady as he welcomed the new officers into the nightmare.

 

**III. Breaking Down**

 He reached across the car. “Thanks, Starsk.”

Starsky had said barely a word the whole way home from the station where they had deposited Forest and Jeanie. Just white-knuckled his way through rush hour traffic, only breaking the silence with a “fucking Barry Manilow” when came on the radio. He clicked it off and they rode in silence the rest of the way to the cottage.

Hutch didn’t want to go into the cottage. Didn’t want to stay in the Torino. Didn’t want to think about the long night ahead of him – the long day after that. And after that. And after that. He rubbed his arm and looked out the window at the sun and the streets and the kids on bikes. How had the world outside remained so much the same when the world inside - his head, his body, this car – had shifted nto something he didn’t recognize?

Starsky shoved the Torino into park and let the engine idle. He wiped a hand across his face and patted Hutch on the thigh. “You want to wait out here a minute?”

Hutch couldn’t take his eyes off the front door. The whole thing was making him a little . . . he couldn’t understand the difficulty he was having staying inside his own skin. Staying inside the car, not floating up and out and away. Then he looked down at his hand, shaking despite the grip he had on his leg, and he understood it completely.

This was withdrawal. He was jonesing right now just like a hundred other hypes he’d seen on the streets. Not the wrenching, retching withdrawal he had just been through at Huggy’s. No this was more subtle, snaking between him and the rational thoughts of moving on, moving forward, beating this . . .

He wanted a hit. He flinched at the sense memory of the needle slipping into his vein, the backwash of blood, the medicine coursing through his body at the speed of light . . .

“Hutch, you okay?” Starsky had turned off the car.

Was he okay? No. Could he be? Maybe. But wouldn’t he feel better just six blocks down the beach, where Snort and Little José could make him forget about the pain and the itch and the guilt that crept up his spine faster than any narcotic?

Starsky hadn’t asked for this. Junkie partner. Probably headed for jail. Most likely headed down that beach sooner or later to score. At the very least, suspension and then suspicion following their every move after that. He should just get out of this car and disappear into the escaping daylight. Escape into the night. Let Starsky mourn him now, instead of later.

The hand that gripped his chin surprised him. He was forced to turn and look into Starsky’s eyes. Forced to face his guilt, his fear. His partner.

“Don’t disappear on me, Hutch. You’re not alone. No matter what you’re brain is telling you right now, you’re not alone. I’m here. You wanna go get drunk, we get drunk. You wanna quit, toss our badges in the sea, drive to Mexico, we’re gone. You wanna burn the cottage to the ground, I got a match. But you’re not doing this alone. You got it?”

He felt the tension drain out of his body. Starsky’s hand moved to the back of his neck, kneading.Healing. Starsky as methadone. He should’ve known.

He squeezed Starsky’s thigh, took a deep breath, swung the Torino’s heavy door open, and walked slowly to the front porch.

 

**IV. Breaking Up**

He was in hell and her name was Marianne. Her name was really Starsky, but he had not evolved that far as a human being to actually name the origin of his pain. No, he had stayed true to form and found a substitute, a doppelganger. A dame.

Definitely not a lady. Or a girl. Or a chick. A dame. All legs and eyes and a voice that carried enough trouble to drown in. This was convenient, since he was tired of circling the drain with his own problems. He had fucked her and fucked her over. She let it all happen to her and thought she deserved it. He let it all happen to him and thought everyone else was fucked up. Which, in his more rational moments, he knew was fucked.

He’d even pissed off Starsky this time. The original source. Disappeared on him. For two days. Showed up messed up. If he didn’t know better, he might have thought Starsky was glad he was beat up, not fucked up. Or high.

He allowed the humorless chuckle. There would be no horse this time. Nothing could save him now. He was the singed fragment of the worst burn-out case since Eddie Orleans dropped his badge and gun on Dobey’s desk and then walked off the 12th street pier.

Everything he touched turned to shit. No wonder he had crashed into a woman who was equally miserable. Equally fucked. The only real difference was that Marianne had not fallen in love with her partner. Just her brother. Which was no difference, really.

And then Starsky met him on the steps of the courthouse, took him home, made him shower and shave, cooked him some ungodly goop he called chicken soup. Did his laundry, changed the sheets on the bed, even got the landlord to fix the screen on the back porch, through which he had “accidentally” thrown an entire bottle of Jack Daniels one night during a bout of guilt and pain and the unrelenting itch to bend his partner over a piece of hard furniture.

He sat on the couch, nursing a beer and watching Starsky burn another batch of toast. He felt a little closer to human than he had in a while. He could almost catch the past out of the corner of his eye – a past that included dinner and a late night movie, his legs tangled in Starsky’s, his hand casually massaging the back of Starsky’s neck, until the movie ended, or it got a little too intimate and Starsky would leap up and, with the promise of “see ya tomorrow, Hutch,” head down the stairs, leaving Hutch a little hard and a little happy.

But that was a lifetime of near misses ago. Sometimes he was surprised to just be standing upright. Sometimes he couldn’t. Sometimes he eyed his service revolver with more than wishful thinking. But most of the time he just shoved it all back into the filthy corners of his soul and carried on.

He watched Starsky walk the length of the apartment, set a tray of soup and bread on the coffee table and shrug into his jacket. The past disappeared forever behind the piano – there were no late night movies in this reality. Only Starsky, pissed, disappointed, probably bleeding, but completely unable to stop taking care of him.

“You oughta take a couple of days off.” Starsky fidgeted with his keys, didn’t look up. “Do you good. Do us good. I can’t keep doing this, you know.”  
The last part trailed off into a whisper and Hutch didn’t look up again until he heard the Torino escape into the future.

 

**V. Breaking Free**

He folded the letter and slid it into the envelope. Starsky looked at him over the rim of his reading glasses, but then settled back into his paper. Didn’t even ask to read it – which was a first for Starsky, the eternal snoop. He drained the cup of barely warm coffee, tapped his fingers, and then swept the envelope off the table and into his pocket.

“Going to the mailbox?” Starsky’s voice carried over the sports page.

“No – this better be in person. Thought I’d stop by the grocery on the way back – want anything?”

Starsky lowered the paper and stared at him, eyebrow raised. He raised his in response and then shoved his chair back and got up. Slowly, since it was morning and since his vertebrae had never ceased their objection to his car hopping, criminal wrestling past. As he waiting for his spine to catch up with the rest of him, he glanced back at Starsky, who had yet to get back into the box scores.

“What?”

“You know what.”

“I forget to kiss you good morning again?”

Starsky smiled, one of those x-rated ones that climb lazily from his lips to his eyebrows, one of those that made victims weep and criminals . . . well, weep.

“No, I think you kissed me good this morning. I’m talking about that letter.”

Hutch patted his pocket. “It’s here. It’s done.”

“Shouldn’t we do something?”

“Didn’t we already?”

Starsky folded the paper, stood and walked over to Hutch, who was trying to scoop up his keys and put on his jacket so as to avoid whatever Starsky had in mind.

“Hutch, stop for just a minute, will ya?”

“No, Starsky, I won’t. I don’t want this to be a big deal. I just want to go, drop off the letter and go tothe store, maybe get a nice pork loin, some asparagus, a chardonnay . . .”

“Asparagus? Are you trying to kill me? I ate something green yesterday.”

“You ate green Skittles yesterday.”

“And . . .?”

“And so you need some green vegetables, and I haven’t cooked in a week and I’m not going to let you make this into a big thing.”

Starsky’s eyebrows wagged. “Oh, yeah?” He reached down and grabbed Hutch’s crotch. “I can make this into a real big thing.”

Hutch twisted away and managed to snag his keys off the table by the front door. Starsky made a grab for him, but he opened the door and escaped down the steps. Starsky shouted something Hutch couldn’t hear and he chuckled as he backed out of the driveway and saw the one lone finger appearing from the front window. That man would never grow up. Thank God.

He got both asparagus and Skittles at the store, wandering the aisles like a man with all the leisure time in the world. Not a realistic possibility, what with Starsky at home. He was probably sitting in the window now, waiting to flip the welcome home bird. Waiting to see if Hutch really did it.

He made one last stop before he pulled in the driveway, and was greeted not with the finger, but with a full moon at three o’clock in the afternoon. Good thing the neighbors were all at work. He honked and the moon disappeared and Starsky threw the door open and walked slowly down the front steps, silent, eyes wide, his mouth a gaping hole. Finally, Hutch had gotten the last word.

*****

Captain Manny Campos waited until shift change to open the letter. He reached into his bottom drawer, pulled out a bottle and a glass and poured himself a stiff shot. He knew this letter was coming for a while, but had hoped maybe the recent personnel changes and salary increases would hold it for another decade or so. He took a drink and began to read the neatly typed paragraph that signaled the end of a career, the end of an era, really.

He’d never worked for the BCPD without them. When Starsky quit ten years earlier, he figured Hutch would have been out the door as well. But he had stayed on, carving his own career from the new technology division and his knack for spotting irregularities in the reams of data the computers spit out on a regular basis.

He sighed. He was getting too damn old. Should hang it up, too. Follow Starsky and Hutch into the sunset. The last of the cowboys. He drained the glass and laid the letter on the scanner, resisting the urge to “accidentally” drop it in the trash, and then hit enter. Shame that one keystroke could eradicate that kind of history.

Then he saw the other letter. The one addressed to “Manny”, the one handwritten, the one that explained everything.

 *****

“I don’t understand . . .” Starsky finally found his voice.

Hutch opened the car door and hopped out. “What is there to understand?”

“Where’d you get it?” Starsky’s hand reached for the hood, but then he jerked it back.

“It’s not going to bite you, Starsk – it’s just something I picked up from the store.”

“Like hell.” Starsky took another step forward and ran a finger along the hood.

“Well, you’re all about making this retirement a big thing, so I decided you were right.” Hutch took Starsky by the shoulder. “And if anything could show you how much I love you, this reincarnation of my nightmare should do it.”

“But, how . . .” Starsky had moved to the driver’s window, fingering the side mirror, his hand trailing down to the door handle. “It’s mine?”

“Of course – who else? I’m keeping my Beemer, thank you. It’s just . . . well, I didn’t want us to just sit here getting old and I know you’ve been looking for one on Ebay, and I just . . .”

Starsky turned around and pulled Hutch close. “You asshole. I love you.” Then he whirled around, yanked open the door, and slid into the car.

“Exactly.” Hutch chuckled and then held his hands to his ears as Starsky cranked the ignition and gunned the accelerator. He wondered for a brief moment exactly what kind of blow job had made this seem like a good idea.

“C’mon, Hutch. Let’s go!”

And the look on Starsky’s face reminded him.


End file.
